Baby, have we really come a long way? In Estee Lauder’s latest ad, model Constance Jablonski wears a wasp-waist floral dress and cool blond coif of perfect Grace Kelly waves. The ad’s tag line is "Shake. Stir. Seduce." If it sounds like a throwback to vintage advertising, that’s because it is — the campaign is touting Lauder’s new makeup collaboration with 1960s-set series Mad Men (the products are cherry red lipstick and creamy pink rouge).

This single image seems to tell a story — she seems furtive, as though ducked behind a doorway to surreptitiously reapply her lipstick, a.k.a. war paint. She’s the stuff of Ozzie and Harriet, of Douglas Sirk’s dreams, but is she at home or, heaven forbid, at the office? Either way, she has to look good.

Fifties fashion was on its last hurrah in 1966, which is roughly the time period Mad Men’s Season 5 premiere begins (apparently, in the summer of ’66). Coincidentally, it’s the same year that legendary advertising doyenne Mary Wells Lawrence founded Wells Rich Greene. I eagerly anticipate a formidable Mad woman composite this season, hopefully someone like Wells Lawrence or Jane Maas, who most famously managed the "I <3 New York campaign" and began her advertising career at Ogilvy & Mather in the early ’60s.

In Maas’s new book, Mad Women, it is only after the halfway point that we hear about what women wore to work at the time. Everything else was more important — even the opening chapter, where Mass recounts a typical day in her life at the Madison Avenue agency of ’67. As a working mother who rose from copywriter to creative director, we get only glimpses of her husband Michael’s Brooks Brothers suit and her daughter’s private school uniform. You might say Mass is a Peggy, with more important things on her mind than hemlines. She even recounts how her priorities were career first, husband second, kids third. Fashion, methinks, was somewhere well below those.

At the point we last left Mad Men in ’65, it was still mostly the stuff of wiggle dresses and Pat Nixon-worthy hostess frocks. In Maas’s memoir, we learn that in ’67 one colleague is known as "miniskirted Linda" because she was one of the first to wear the trend to work.

Then as now, the shapewear category was about discipline. For the past four seasons, interviews with Mad Men’s female cast have predictably emphasized just how essential all the underpinnings are to getting into character, not just into costume.

The effects of stifling nylon and elastic are psychological, even if they’re about as sexy as the high-waisted granny panties that Hugh Grant mockingly snaps on Renee Zellweger’s Bridget Jones.

"Everything in the ’60s seemed to conspire to make women’s lives more difficult or more uncomfortable," Maas writes. "We wore clothing that was supposed to help us look feminine and sexually attractive but that created torture underneath."

She rhymes off at least as much equipment as a football player dons when readying for the field, but in her case the torturous layers are more aesthetic than protective: tight, pointed bras that dug into tender shoulder skin, seamed nylon stockings held up by fiddly suspended garters (remember, pantyhose had yet to become popular), a girdle, a slip and obligatory high heels everywhere ("even at home to do housework").

To this, add a sheath dress and tailored jacket and top with a hat, which was not only a fashion statement — at Ogilvy, Maas says, wearing a hat in the office proclaimed status above mere secretary; in Mad Men, Peggy Olson wears it to and from the office but not during the day. "It’s one of the rare bits of costuming that Mad Men gets wrong," Maas says.

Over at Banana Republic, meanwhile, the latest spring instalment of the retailer’s ongoing official Mad Men collection by Janie Bryant focuses less on the workplace panache and more on the country club scenes and is, thankfully, almost indistinguishable from the rest of the offering. A pocket square here, a contrast-piped polo there, plus capri pants and a party dress (minus the torpedo shaped torso). Yet Maas recalls that while at Lawrence, routinely working 14-hour days, she "never allowed herself to look tired" and, over the years, never gained as much as an ounce — she ate her daily lunch of raw vegetables with a glass of water on fine imported china. Ah, the glamour of it all.

For more input into the memoir of the era, Maas canvassed such grande dames of advertising as Joan Lipton, who worked at Young & Rubicam (the agency that inspired Sterling Cooper), and another seasoned Mad woman recalls how when she started out in the typing pool, she lost her virginity "to the account executive on Jell-O" because that was a compulsory extracurricular activity for career advancement.

"Why should men take us seriously as advertising professionals? Women weren’t even taken seriously as consumers," Mass writes. "We were at best decorative fluff heads; our biggest concerns were ring around the collar and wax buildup on the kitchen floor." Female writers were hired because of the glut of "packaged goods" — those sold in supermarkets and therefore under the jurisdiction of women’s household dollars — but they were not respected in the workplace, even after David Ogilvy famously declared that, "the consumer is not a moron; she is your wife."

Nostalgia comes at a price and 45 years later, women’s underwear oppression and liberation have come full circle. Pantyhose, invented in 1959 and popularized by Twiggy, Mary Quant and Jean Shrimpton and their miniskirts in 1966 and beyond. Spanx founder Sara Blakely, for instance, built her empire on a first prototype of strong-control footless pantyhose. And this month Blakely, 41, became the youngest self-made woman to crack Forbes’ annual billionaire list (Christy Walton, heiress of WalMart, and Lilian Bettencourt, daughter of the cosmetic giant L’Oreal founder, don’t count). In Spanx’s line of workout gear, Blakely’s beloved power pants have a built-in shaping panel, so as to avoid showing your pooch, or looking cottage-cheese lumpy, even while seeking zen from everyday stress in yoga class.

That makes me wish the Forbes victory hadn’t been for slimming compression undergarments. A girdle by any other name is still a girdle.

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